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This chapter explores the potential for musical medievalism within metal, exploring the ways in which metal musicians have sought to include ‘authentic’ medieval musical languages within their music. The medieval repertoire poses many challenges even for early music specialists, and the musical idioms of metal and medieval music rarely overlap, leading many medievalist metal bands to rely instead on normative metal styles with occasional references to specific identifiable melodies. The chapter focusses particularly on the American metal band Obsequiae, who have drawn inspiration particularly from the medieval polyphonic repertoire, which required creating much more oblique musical connections. Obsequiae’s albums feature acoustic guitar and harp arrangements of medieval polyphonic works, but their metal songs likewise adopt some general qualities of medieval polyphony. The obscure nature of the connections is likely beyond many listeners, but paradoxically the lack of obvious musical medievalism can also cultivate the appearance of a deeper connection.

This chapter explores how medieval signifiers function in black metal’s musical style, lyrics, and album imagery, specifically albums using woodcut engravings. It analyses how the word ‘medieval’ functions in ­discourses about those albums, including reviews, magazines, forum discussions, and YouTube comments. The analysis combines qualitative close readings with quantitative analyses of word frequencies, indicating which albums have provoked the term ‘medieval’ most. I then show which other terms are closely paired with it – descriptive adjectives, analogies and associative imagery, and various aesthetic judgments. I compare these findings with close music analyses to offer stylistic explanations for black metal’s enduring fascination with the medieval. Finally, the chapter explores how black metal’s associations with the medieval also intersect with notions of cultural purity and political controversies within medieval studies itself.

Zech’s so-called Nachdichtung or ‘adaptation’ Die lasterhaften Lieder und Balladen des François Villon is one of the most printed books of German lyric poetry and has been widely misinterpreted as a translation of French medieval poet François Villon. The erroneous attribution of these texts has caused an immense amount of confusion and misinformation to spread in relation to the authorship of several poems due to the popularisation of these supposedly medieval texts by medieval metal bands In Extremo and Subway to Sally. Zech’s fascinating artistic fraud forms the framework for questioning how source material, which ranges from authentic historical texts through to ex nihilo pseudo-medieval writings, is situated between the related, at times conflicting, norms and traditions of medieval market music and mittelalter metal.

This chapter analyses the different ways in which metal album covers draw upon medieval media. The analysis is situated within the broad theoretical frame of intermediality, and more specifically view the process where medieval media cross the borders and find their way into metal album covers as media transformation. Four different types of media transformation are analysed, and it is argued that the medievalism of album covers can be defined in terms of media transformation. Likewise, neomedievalism is defined in terms of second-order media transformation. The album cover is described as a media patchwork, and the chapter gives examples of the patches in terms of relationship and properties.

The chapters in the Nationalism and Identity in Metal Medievalism section consider a range of historical figures and practices as presented in metal music. Amaranta Saguar García’s analysis of references to El Cid in ‘The Return of El Cid: The Topicality of Rodrigo Díaz in Spanish Heavy Metal’ focusses on issues of nationalism and the varying representations of El Cid in a range of songs. In a similar manner, Annika Christensen’s ‘Making Heritage Metal: Faroese KvæÐi and Viking Metal’ looks at the interplay of medieval ballads and modern folk metal as part of the group Tyr’s investment in celebrating and articulating Faroese identity. While these two essays work with specific examples of national identities, Shamma Boyarin’s ‘The Prophet Himself Had Knowledge of Him: Nile’s “Iskander D’hul Kharnon” and a Different Kind of Metal Medievalism’ uses the figure of Alexander the Great to address the broader question of the ways that representations of classical and medieval figures define civilisations. Dean Swinford’s ‘Black Metal’s Medieval King: The Apotheosis of Euronymous through Album Dedications’ examines the medievalisation of Euronymous and its relation to black metal’s medievalist self-representation. Within this collaborative chapter, the authors explore the areas of greatest overlap in our explorations of metal music and medieval culture: nationalism and identities, neofascism, the whitewashed Middle Ages, and issues of historical authenticity in neomedievalism.

Black metal has the power to stimulate the mind, to bring the listener to the very edge of an intellectual nihilistic abyss. While the experience of black metal can be one of transcendence and annihilation, it is nevertheless rooted in the embodiment of the listener. Black metal’s primal sound and aesthetic are closely associated with the chaotic lower abdomen, including the generative organs and the bowels, which in medieval cosmology represented torment, melancholia, and demonic forces. Black metal bowellism translates this medieval visceral inversion into an expression of the Bakhtian Grotesque, a gleeful and anarchic rejection of the hierarchical order. This chapter connects this metaphysical inversion to a desire to return to an imagined medieval world, but one of dissolution and decay rather than a reconstitution of older hierarchies.

This chapter explores how, by drawing inspiration from Islamic sources for a song about Alexander the Great, death metal band Nile have created space for a more complicated view of the Middle Ages than is traditionally found in either heavy metal or Western medieval studies. Even though the historical Alexander the Great was not a medieval figure, legends about him were especially popular in the Middle Ages, and his figure in Muslim traditions was influenced by his reception in the Middle Ages. Alexander the Great is a transcultural figure. He bridges East and West, both in the trajectory of his life, and in the diffusion of his legends, which survive in multilingual and multicultural medieval versions. His story also transcends boundaries of strict periodisation: the medieval Alexander materials are as influential to current ideas about him as are materials from his own era. In this context, Nile’s 2009 album Those Whom the Gods Detest offers an interesting case study for thinking about metal medievalism. This study opens new ways of thinking about the cultural scope of heavy metal and how metal might contribute to a broadening of studies in medievalism.

The digital humanities offer many new methods to scholars interested in metal studies. This chapter demonstrates two such methods, that is, stylometric clustering and topic modelling, by interpreting the collected lyrics of over 8,000 metal bands. This allowed the authors to identify general trends that would be hard to derive by personally reading lyrics. This analysis showed several recurring medieval topics in metal lyrics, for example, a Fight for Glory expressed with words like ‘die’, ‘glory’, ‘warriors’, and ‘victory’. The authors were also able to distinguish metal bands with medieval references from those without – a line of research that could help in categorising (new) bands – and track the stylistic development of bands over time. Such statistical methods might help scholars not only by allowing for large-scale studies, yet also by providing inter-subjective feedback for theories.

More than 20 songs by Spanish and non-Spanish bands about the Castilian lord and epic hero Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, account for the topicality of the Hispanic Middle Ages in heavy metal. This chapter explores how diversely El Cid is addressed in 10 of these songs, in particular, from the perspectives of reception theory and both the cultural background of the band (Spanish or non-Spanish) and the language in which the lyrics are written (Spanish or English). Through detailed textual analysis and contextualisation, I will examine how, for Spanish (and Spanish-American) bands, El Cid serves the purpose of naturalising the stereotypical heavy-metal medieval knight, thereby functioning as a vindication of Hispanic cultural heritage within what is perceived to be an Anglo-American (and Germanic-Nordic) dominated musical scene. By contrast, non-Spanish bands resort primarily to El Cid to refresh the overused motif of the medieval knight, but sometimes in a more connoted manner as well, in which his iconic value as a Moor-slayer and a defender of the Western white Christian principles is highlighted. Moreover, I will discuss the appropriation and re-appropriation of El Cid by, respectively, non-Spanish and Spanish heavy metal bands, from the point of view of cultural appreciation and appropriation, and Islamophobia.